Dog Symphony

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HUMANS SUFFER AS DOGS suffer, they struggle as dogs struggle, they love order as dogs love order. Long live the whistle and baton.

I came to Argentina at the invitation of Dr. Ana Mariategui. I had known her, at that point, for nine years. She started her academic career at the University of Santiago; the University of Buenos Aires recruited her two years prior to our first meeting. We worked in a minuscule field. I studied the history of prison architecture. She was, in turn, a historiographer of the technical jargon that prison historians use in their profession.

We had often spoken of visiting each other. I will come to you, she said, and you can show me the sights of the northern capital (her private name for my city); you can come to me, and I will show you the sights of this shithole. I did not use those terms to describe Buenos Aires; in our correspondence I referred to it only as the southern capital. This dilatory premise we conceived and resuscitated many times through our near decade of friendship, but nothing ever came of it. We always met in cities foreign to us both. Prague, where we became acquainted; Lyon, where we slept together for the first time; Austin, Texas, where I was extremely sick and Ana read aloud to me from Dead Souls, which she always carried with her on her travels, along with the Pensées; Istanbul, where we got lost in Kasımpaşa by becoming too drunk to follow our guide’s directions and had to present ourselves at a local police precinct. The sergeant there knew — miraculously — the name of the tour company our academic sponsors had hired, who saved us by shouting into the void through an old, grass-green walkie-talkie.

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